He wanted to love his difficult uncle the way the sermons described it, instantly, generously, without the friction he actually felt every time the man opened his mouth at a family gathering. He tried the shortcut more than once, forcing warm feelings that were not there yet, performing patience for an hour and collapsing into irritation the moment he got back to his car. The gap between what he wanted to feel and what he actually felt kept widening instead of closing, and he started to wonder if real love toward someone like his uncle was simply a capacity he had been left out of.
Peter writes to us about exactly this kind of gap, though not in the language of failure. He tells us that God’s divine power has already given us everything required for a godly life, through the knowledge of the one who called us, and that through this same power we have been given great and precious promises, so that we might actually participate in God’s own nature.
Confirming One’s Calling and Election
3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
2 Peter 1:3-4 New International Version
The starting point here is supply, not shortage. God’s own nature has already been placed inside anyone who belongs to him. What Peter describes next is not a method for acquiring something foreign to us. It is a process for actually expressing a nature already given, letting it surface in visible qualities rather than staying buried under the version of us that has not yet learned how to let it show.
A Chain, Not a Single Leap
What comes next is a specific, ordered list. Make every effort, Peter writes, to add goodness to faith, knowledge to goodness, self-control to knowledge, perseverance to self-control, godliness to perseverance, brotherly affection to godliness, and love to brotherly affection.
5 For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6 and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7 and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love.
2 Peter 1:5-7 New International Version
What I am about to say next is really just a strong opinion not a statement of fact or a universal rule. I think that the structure matters as much as the content. Where each quality is built onto the one immediately before it, in that order, but I won’t say fixed order, but ending with love rather than beginning there. I think that if you are looking for a quick route straight to the final item on this list, which is love, you will not find one in the actual text. Because Peter writes a staircase, not a door.
And this I believe explains something about why loving a difficult relative on command so often fails. Love is built on affection, which is built on godliness, which is built on perseverance, which is built on self-control, which is built on knowledge, which is built on goodness, which is built on faith. Skipping the middle steps does not make love arrive faster. It usually produces the strained, performative version he kept forcing in his own driveway, a feeling manufactured without the structure underneath it to actually hold it up.
The Knowledge Step Nobody Wants to Slow Down For
The middle of this chain deserves particular attention, since it is the part most often skipped by someone eager to reach the end. Knowledge sits directly after goodness and directly before self-control, and in context this is not abstract information but a genuine, growing understanding of God and of the actual person in front of us. A man trying to love his uncle without first doing the slower work of understanding him, what shaped his bitterness, what fear sits underneath his harshest comments, is trying to build self-control and perseverance on a foundation that was never laid. The effort collapses not because he lacks willpower but because a step got skipped.
Why the List Still Requires Effort
Peter’s instruction to make every effort sits next to the earlier claim that everything needed has already been given, and that deserves a real answer rather than a quick smoothing over. The qualities on this list are not automatic. They require deliberate building, one on top of the last, and Peter is not describing a passive unfolding that happens without our participation. What he is describing is effort that works with a supply already present rather than effort straining to manufacture something from nothing. I have a related piece about the weight of perfectionism, which makes a similar distinction, between striving that assumes we must create our own worth from scratch and striving that simply puts already-given resources to honest, deliberate use.
What an Honest Middle Step Looks Like
For anyone standing where he stood, trying to love someone difficult and finding only strain where warmth was supposed to be, the passage suggests a genuinely different starting point than love itself. Start further back. Ask what actual knowledge is missing, about God’s word, about Christ life and the way He loved, about the other person, about what shaped them, about what self-control would even require in this specific relationship before affection has any real foundation to stand on. And yes, again, I have another separate piece about hosting a relative who is hard to love, which covers some of what this can look like in practice, a welcome extended honestly rather than a warmth forced prematurely, which is closer to what Peter’s staircase actually asks of us.
Read Also: When Forgiveness Feels Impossible But Bitterness Feels Worse
Read Also: Gracious and Honest at the Same Time
Read Also: Stewardship Spotlight: The One-Drawer Rule for Small Clutter
Conclusion
He stopped trying to feel instant warmth toward his uncle somewhere around the following year, and started instead with the much smaller, much slower work the passage actually describes, a little more patience before responding, a little more honest curiosity about what made the man so defensive in the first place. The affection came eventually, steadier and less forced than the version he had tried to manufacture at the beginning, built the way Peter seems to have expected it would be, one deliberate step at a time. What finally reached his uncle was not a feeling he had invented out of nothing. It was something already placed in him from the beginning, given room, at last, to actually show.
